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Thursday, June 25, 2009

An international team inventorying the wildlife of the Comoros archipelago (where the coelacanth was discovered in 1938) has added a tiny mammal to the reference books. The new bat Miniopterus aelleni weighs only five grams. Kitti's hog-nosed bat, from Thailand (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) weighs only two grams, so this isn't a record. But it's startlingly small nonetheless.